A billiard cue is basically a tapered shaft with a tip attached to the very front end for making the contact with the cue ball. Billiard cues may have one or more releasable joints along their length. The shaft or shafts that form the body of a billiard cue have been made from a great variety of materials. There are prior billiard cue shafts which include a wood core and a skin of composite material such as glass fiber/epoxy or carbon fiber/epoxy. These prior shafts are made with a maple or other hard and heavy (11-12 g/ci) wood core and coated with a thin skin of low grade composite material. These low strength composite skins may increase stiffness slightly but they also add weight. Because these materials average about 2½ times the density of the wood core, the prior composite coated wood shafts are heavier than like sized solid wood shafts which is particularly undesirable for the first few inches of the tip end of a cue; indeed, U.S. Pat. No. 6,162,128 describes a way of reducing the mass of the first few inches of a solid maple shaft by boring a hole which removes only a few grams but has proven to improve performance (by reducing “cue ball deflection”) and shafts built this way have become quite popular with top players. Another issue is straightness; the kinds of hardwoods used in prior composite coated wood shafts tend to be rather unstable and it is predictable that the wood cores are not perfectly straight to begin with. The coating is likely somewhat unevenly applied and the shaft is then centerless sanded and in the end result these shafts are not any straighter on average than solid wood shafts. One advantage these shafts have is that they do not get dinged up on the surface like pure wood shafts do, but in spite of this advantage they have never become popular with the better players.